Inside the List

Notorious: After spending two and a half months on the hardcover fiction list last year, Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” slips onto the trade paperback list this week at No. 8. The paperback follows on the heels of another book that should appeal to Gaiman’s fans — Hayley Campbell’s winningly scrapbookish tribute, “The Art of Neil Gaiman,” which Audrey Niffenegger describes in the foreword as “a sort of midcareer retrospective.” The book recounts Gaiman’s early days as a hungry arts journalist and his rise to cult success as a writer of comic books, notably the “Sandman” series, before he turned his hand to novels. It also reminds readers that Neil himself (as he’s known on Twitter) once wrote a scrapbookish tribute of his own: His first published book — “written solely for the money,” he says — was “Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five” (1984). “I got a phone call from a lady,” Gaiman explains in an interview cited in the book, “and she said would you like to write a rock ’n’ roll book for us? A rock ’n’ roll biography? And I thought, ‘Oh God, yes! I’m in!’ ” Gaiman suggested a handful of subjects, including the Velvet Underground, David Bowie and Elvis Costello, before the editor interrupted: “Do you want to write the Duran Duran book, the Barry Manilow book or the Def Leppard book?” Pragmatism led him to choose the relative newcomers Duran Duran. “With Barry Manilow,” he said, “I figured I was going to have to listen to, you know, 40 Barry Manilow albums.”

Brave Enough: Lisa See’s eighth novel, “China Dolls,” enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 10. Set in San Francisco in the 1930s and ’40s, the book explores the world of Chinese nightclubs and how they echoed the mainstream entertainment of the time: “There were performers who were billed as the Chinese Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the Chinese Frank Sinatra . . . and the Chinese Houdini,” See told The Naples Daily News in Florida in 2012. “Recently, I interviewed the Chinese Ginger Rogers, who’s 92 years old and amazing. And not Chinese, by the way.” See herself is one-eighth Chinese; her great-grandfather Fong See came to the United States in 1871 and became a successful businessman who at one point sold crotchless underwear to California brothels — a story See related in her first book, the family history “On Gold Mountain.” After her parents divorced when she was young, See spent a lot of time with her grandfather, Fong’s son, at the family’s antiques store in Los Angeles. “I have red hair and freckles, so I don’t look very Chinese, but I did grow up in a very traditional Chinese-American family,” she told Voice of America in 2011. “I think all of us here in the United States, we all had someone in our families who was brave enough, scared enough, dumb enough, crazy enough to leave their home country to come here. But there is still a part of us that is tied to our original homeland.”